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Insider

IIUG Insider (Issue #138)
December 2011

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Highlights: Informix 2011 highlights

Welcome to the International Informix Users Group (IIUG) Insider! Designed for IIUG members and Informix user group leaders, this publication contains timely and relevant information for the IBM Informix community.

Contents:

 

Editorial Back to top

The highlights of 2011 were increasing the Informix portfolio with the Informix Warehouse Accelerator and Genero, the IIUG conference, Continuing Support Offering for Informix versions 7.31, 9.4 and 10 and new packaging. For 2012 we are expecting a new Informix release, an exciting IIUG conference in San Diego and more Informix sales and Informix users. We hope the one day Informix will be ahead of Oracle for real, not just on Las Vegas taxi cabs.

I would like to wish you all a wonderful year.

Gary Ben-Israel
IIUG Insider Editor

A note from the IIUG president

Just to remind all my friends out there that the Early Bird Special Conference pricing expires on January 15, 2012. The current low price of $695 (USD) will go up (and remember IIUG members can get another $100 of to bring it down to an unheard of low $595 for the full conference price).

Stuart Litel
IIUG President


Highlights Back to top

Informix 2011 highlights

The year as summarized by Insider highlights:

January

  • Elections for the IIUG Board of Directors 2011 announced

February

  • Nominations for the 2011 IIUG Board of Directors opens

March

  • Keynote at the IIUG conference by IBM Watson/Jeopardy! Lead Researcher, Dr. David A. Ferrucci
  • IBM Informix Ultimate Warehouse Edition
  • IBM Informix Genero
  • IBM, C&W Partner On UK Smart Energy Cloud

April

  • IBM Informix Early Validation Program

May

  • Thank You note from Jerry Keesee for 2011 IIUG Conference

June

  • The 10th anniversary of the Informix acquisition into the IBM family
  • 10 Years After: Perspective from the Informix Sales Team
  • 10 Years After: Perspective from the Informix Marketing Team

July

  • Informix Dynamic Server 11.70.xC4 Early Validation Program Announcement

August

  • Compare the Informix Version 11 editions

September

  • Continuing Support Offering for Informix versions 7.31, 9.4 and 10

October

  • IBM is ahead of Oracle>
  • IBM Informix Growth Edition Warehouse V11.7

November

  • IBM Informix goes to the University; Learned by over 4K students and still counting

December

  • Happy New Year!
     

Conference corner Back to top

2012 IIUG Informix Conference Update

We have been overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of speaker submissions for the 2012 IIUG Conference. The submissions cover every facet of topics pertinent to Informix users and administrators, including new features like Time Series and the new IBM Genero product line, as well as tried and true "must have" topics like those involving maximizing your system performance while minimizing system downtime. Our speakers for this year's conference are the best our Informix community has to offer and include several new speakers.

The IIUG Conference committee worked through the fall to review all submitted presentations to select the very best sessions, hands-on-labs and tutorials for the 2012 Conference. The sessions we've chosen include interesting and relevant topics that can be used to reinforce your professional skills and keep current in today's changing market. Remember, the 2012 IIUG Conference is not "Just For DBAs" anymore: Bring your application developers too!

Please continue to review the conference website for regular updates at http://www.iiug.org/conf. The Conference website will be updated as speakers confirm their selection to include details of sessions, hands-on-labs and tutorials. The 2012 IIUG Conference will be our best conference to date.

To take advantage of the early bird registration price of $695, register for the Conference by January 15, 2012. Save an additional $100 if you are an IIUG member. If you are not currently an IIUG member and want to take advantage of the additional $100 savings, please go to http://www.iiug.org/iiug/join.html. There is no fee to become an IIUG member. Becoming a member will increase your Conference savings, and allows access to the Members Only section of the IIUG Website, where downloads of some of the latest IBM Informix products are available, as well as IIUG-only utilities written by DBAs for DBAs.

To register for the Conference or for additional information, go to:

https://www.iiug.org/conf/2012/iiug/register.php

A document that may help convince your supervisor or other management to allow you to attend the 2012 IIUG Conference can be found here:

http://www.iiug.org/conf/2012/iiug/2012_IIUG_Justification.pdf

This document provides information you can use to support your Conference attendance proposal. Remember, this is the best conference you will find for the money! We think you might find San Diego to be no more expensive to get to than Overland Park was. There is no need to rent a car in San Diego, as the airport is a cheap cab ride from the conference hotel. And many air routes to San Diego are no more expensive than to Kansas City; a surprising number we checked were cheaper!

See you at the Conference!
Apr 22 - 25, 2012
San Diego Marriott Mission Valley, San Diego, California


IIUG corner Back to top

Web Site Help

Can you find everything you are looking for on the www.iiug.org website? I know it can be a challenge at times. The fact is, there is just SO MUCH out there it can be hard to organize. In an effort to make this less painful, a new HELP link has been added to the front page of the web site. When you click it, you will get an expanded tree of the menus under the tabs on the right side of the page. Hopefully this will help! Here are the details.

Resources

IIUG Insider - quick link to the current issues, with the ability to find past issues.

IIUG Hotspots - Links to commonly used items on the web site (basically the old web site arrangement).

IIUG.org Hot Spots:

  • Software Repository
  • Conferences Corner
  • IIUG Sponsor Program
  • IIUG Press Partners
  • IDS New Feature Requests (aka VNext)
  • comp.databases.informix
  • Informix Books
  • Informix-List
  • Calendar of Events
  • Local User Groups
  • IIUG Insider
  • IIUG Discussion Lists
  • Webcast Corner

Related User Communities:

  • Open-Source for Informix Project
  • International DB2 User Group
  • Rational Software Global Users
  • U2 User Group
  • WebSphere Software Global Users
  • Tivoli Software Global Users

Informix Links - These are all links to other website locations of interested in the following areas:

  • IBM: various IBM.com links that are of most interest to the Informix users such as the Processor Value Units Calculations; Business Partner; and End of Service Dates
  • Blogs: links to the top Informix bloggers we know of
  • Informix 11.70: Latest and greatest Informix product information
  • Social Media: Join all the Informix communities for LinkedIn and Facebook
  • Training: Includes conferences
  • Tutorials: The Informix detective game and certification prep

International - Tabs for information in languages besides English

IIUG RSS Feeds

Software Repository - These pages allow you to access the IIUG Software Repository and other Informix-related archives on the Net.

  • About the Software Repository
  • Repository Index
  • Repository Search
  • Repository Upload
  • Mobile Apps

Product Offerings (was Informix Products) - This area shows you the current offerings and product lines from IBM.

  • IBM Informix Solutions
  • Informix 11.7 Editions
  • IBM Informix Products
  • IBM Informix Tools and components

Online Resources - This lists a number of tools , magazines and newsletters, and conference information.

  • Online Resources - collection of links
  • Magazines and Newsletters - hot links to various online information
  • Past Conferences and Events - this has recorded Webcasts, as well as a reminder that you need to become a member of IIUG and then you can have access to the conference presentations from past conferences.

Technical Library (was Document Library) - Tabs for each topic of interest and a collection of various information for that topic.

  • Informix History
  • Informix Family
  • FAQs
  • 4GL
  • Cloudscape
  • Genero
  • Informix
  • Informix 7
  • Informix 9
  • Informix 10
  • Informix 11
  • Innovator-C
  • Linux
  • NewEra
  • ODBC/CSDK
  • OnBar
  • TimeSeries
  • Tivoli
  • Warehouse

Books and RedBooks - a list of known books on Informix and a dynamically created link to every Redbook.

  • Books on Informix
  • General Database Books
  • IBM Redbooks

IIUG Banners - pictures you can download for presentations and use at Local User Group meetings.

Analyst Reports/Success Stories - links you can show your management that detail the success stories from various companies and include a few analyst reports related to Informix.

Discussion

Technical Special interest Groups (SIGS) - Discussion groups technical issues or preferred languages.

Other Discussion - Discussion groups that are not sponsored by IIUG.

Community

Events - List of upcoming Events from the calendar.

Webcasts/Chat w Lab - recorded Webcasts and Chat with the Labs.

IIUG TV - Videos about the Informix worlds.

IIUG Sponsors - a list of very special Informix using businesses that have sponsored the IIUG.

Business Directory - Businesses are invited to list themselves in our directory of Informix products

IIUG Press Partners - list of magazines publishing IIUG articles.

Local User Groups - List of every organized user group in various locales throughout the world.

Job Board - Hunting for a job, or wanted to post a job -this is the place.

If you have any questions about where to find items on the web site, or any suggestions for a more efficient organization, please email me! webcontent@iiug.org or kate@iiug.org.

Kate Tomchik, IIUG Board of Directors


Developer corner Back to top

Informix Chat with the Lab

Topic:    Century Financials Software - "The Advantage For Informix Customers"
 
Date:    Thursday, Jan 19, 2012
 
Time:    8:30 AM Pacific
10:30 AM Central
11:30 AM Eastern
4:30 PM London
5:30 PM Frankfurt and Paris
10:00 PM India

While IBM Informix is the database software voted #1 in customer satisfaction, clients choose Informix because it is reliable, low cost, and hassle free. Century Software is an IBM solution provider that choose to build our Century Financials, Enterprise Class, ERP suite on Informix for its best-of-breed embeddability, and its performance. With one of the largest Informix user bases in the world, Century Financials is the most comprehensive Financial ERP solution designed and developed to utilize the power and functionality of the Informix relational database management system. Leveraging an IBM validated architecture, Century Financials is implemented in over 110 enterprises, with over 100,000 customers using IBM's Informix database every day.

Register for this event at https://events.webdialogs.com/register.php?id=230902b822&l=en-US

For questions about this event, contact the host at: mckeithe@us.ibm.com.


Informix news Back to top

Press Releases:

Informix is Going Back to Wild West: http://bit.ly/vxGYoy

Blogs:

Does Informix Genero support REST based web services? Read this Blogpost to get the details: http://ibm.co/rO1DnQ

Articles:

IBM Informix Health Advisor Plug-in for OpenAdmin Tool (OAT): http://ibm.co/tbpSpj

A summary of the most popular IBM Informix Technical documents that you could refer to: http://ibm.co/uWLwQI


Support corner Back to top

New Built-in SQL Functions

Informix is continuously working to make new SQL functions for compatibility and effortless application migration experience. Informix provides numerous built-in functions that you can use in queries to return data or perform operations on data. It recently introduced several new built-in SQL functions for string manipulation and trigonometric support. Let’s take a quick peek in these functions.

String Manipulation Functions

String manipulation functions return either a character string derived from an argument to the function, or an integer that describes a string argument.

Table 1: String Manipulation Functions

Function Description
CHARINDEXSearches for a character string within a source string and return its starting position. Following is an example to find out the first position of a space within the column name ‘company’ in ‘stores7:customer’ table.
 
SELECT CHARINDEX( ' ', company) FROM stores7:customer;
 
In this example space is the character string to search and ‘company’ is the source. You can use third argument with CHARINDEX() to specify start at an offset (start_position) in the source string.
INSTRSearch for an occurrence of a character substring starting at a specific offset. Following is an example to find out the first occurrence of substring ‘Sport’ starting from first position within the column name ‘company’ in ‘stores7:customer’ table.
 
SELECT INSTR(company, 'Sport', 1, 1) FROM stores7:customer;
LENGTHReturns the number of bytes in a character column. Following SQL shows an example of LENGTH function.
 
SELECT company FROM stores7:customer
WHERE LENGTH(company) > 15;
REVERSEReturns the input string in its reverse order. Here is an example:
 
SELECT REVERSE(fname) AS MirrorImage, fname AS Name
FROM stores7:customer;
SPACEReturns a string consisting of ‘N’ space characters. For example create a five characters of blank spaces :
 
SELECT fname, SPACE(5), lname FROM stores7:customer;
SUBSTRING_INDEXReturns the substring that ends at a specific occurrence of a delimiter. Following is an example where you extracting the area code from column name ‘phone’ that has ‘-‘ as delimiter:
 
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(phone, '-', 1) AreaCode
FROM stores7:customer;

Trigonometric Functions

Trigonometric functions convert the units of angular measurement of a numeric expression argument from radians into degrees, or from degrees into radians.

Table 2: Trigonometric Functions

Function Description
DEGREESIt used for get angle in degrees of the specified number expression. It returns same type of numeric expression. Following example returns 286.478897565412 as an angle in degree for specified angle in radians value 5
 
SELECT DEGREES(5) FROM stores7:customer;,/td>
RADIANSIt calculates the angle in radians from the specified measurement in degrees of the angle. Following is an example of RADIANS which returns 4.99:
 
SELECT RADIANS(286) FROM stores7:customer;

All the above functions were introduced in Informix version 11.50.xC3. Hhope you find a good use of them.

Sanjit Chakraborty


Informix resources Back to top

Informix blogs and things  
 
Calendar of events Back to top

January - 2012
Date Event Location Contact
15 Chicago Area Informix User Group Meeting Chicago, IBM TEC Center Rob Beal
April - 2012
Date Event Location Contact
22-25 IIUG Informix Conference San Diego, CA Cindy Lichtenauer
 

Useful links Back to top

http://www.iiug.org/quicklinks.html


Closing and credits Back to top

The International Informix Users Group (IIUG) is an organization designed to enhance communications between its worldwide user community and IBM. The IIUG's membership database now exceeds 25,000 entries and enjoys the support and commitment of IBM's Data Management division. Key programs include local user groups and special interest groups, which we promote and assist from launch through growth.

Sources:  IIUG Board of Directors
IBM Corp.
Editors:  Gary Ben-Israel

For comments, please send an email to gary@iiug.org.